Nuclear Biosphere

The year of the extreme:

Here we are, and it is only February, hearing a lot of chattered about some of the most extreme of the extreme policy recommendations from both the Congress and our State Legislature. There is a radical political shift in the United States that neither the Democrats or Republicans of the old guard are comfortable with. Not only has there been a political shift, there has also been an environmental shift over the last 70 years now. There is a new normal and I am not sure it is the right path to be taking.

Remember when the weather was just the weather and we referenced the almanac (pre milleninual) to predict what would ‘probably’ occur based on the astronomical or meteorological information, usually including future positions of celestial objects, star magnitudes, and culmination dates of constellations (farmers understood this). Well, we seem to have gone from simple unpredictable weather assessment to computerized data modeling using algorithms someone developed based on historical data from the recent past to determine trends.

A couple of those trends were the temperature cooling of the 1970’s, followed by an uptick starting shortly after called ‘global warming’. When warming slowed to almost non-existence, a consensus of climate watchers decided to change the term to ‘climate change’. The climate changes constantly and even that term wasn’t working out politically. Therefore, a new term more precise has been introduced as ‘extreme weather’. This allows any weather front that seems out of the ordinary to be referred to as ‘extreme weather’.

The most recent Arctic blast, dubbed a Polar Vortex, is an example of extreme weather except that it was actually more normal than extreme. The last one was just in 2014, so does two extremes make one normal? The California drought has been bombarded with fire and rain the last several years now. Are these extremes or is this just what happens in the weather cycles around the globe. What are the influences? Sun? Man? Or Physics itself?

The same confusion is occurring in the energy sectors too. The positions of the Green New Deal and the New Mexico Governor’s policy to decarbonize the state is definitely an extreme.